A primary component of the operational cost of a data center is energy consumption of devices that make up the data center network. As the number of devices in a data center network increases, the overall energy consumption (and cost thereof) also increases. Over the course of a decade, the amount of energy consumed by an average data center has increased tremendously. Data center switches consume a considerable amount of power even when they are not actively being used. It would be useful to reduce the overall amount of power consumption of a data center network in a manner that does not negatively impact the performance of the network.